Chris Mullen is an associate professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Mississippi where he served three years as interim department chair. He earned his Ph.D. at Princeton University, master’s of civil engineering at Rice University, preceptorship at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and bachelor’s of civil engineering at Rice. Before earning his Ph.D., Mullen worked five years at Mobil Research and Development Corp. in the Offshore Engineering Division — two years of which were spent with Mobil Exploration and Producing Southeast Morgan City field office. He then joined the consulting firm ADAPCO Inc. as an FE analyst and later WAI as a bridge engineer.
Mullen has served UM for over 20 years, conducting research projects for the U.S. Department of Energy, the Department of Transportation, Department of Homeland Security (Science and Technology and FEMA), the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency and the Mississippi Department of Transportation; publishing widely in archival journals and conference proceedings; and engaging in professional service through consulting in bridge collapse investigations, appointment on the state Earthquake Advisory Council and peer review of state Mitigation Plan updates and hurricane mitigation insurance incentives. He has advised numerous doctoral and master’s students and upperclassmen, and taught courses on engineering and structural mechanics, steel design, pre-stressed concrete design, civil engineering design, finite element analysis, multihazard analysis and design, and response of structures to extreme loading.
He has served the state in a variety of outreach capacities, co-founding the UM Center for Community Earthquake Preparedness and co-writing the first earthquake component of the state and UM campus Mitigation Plans. He served in the emergency operations center during Hurricanes Dennis and Katrina then as Mississippi representative on the FEMA Mitigation Assessment Team. He joined the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1978 and has served as chair of the SEI Methods of Analysis technical committee, associate editor for the Journal of Structural Engineering and as a member of the EMI Objective Resilience technical committee. He has been a member of the NIBS Multihazard Mitigation Council and the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute. He recently participated in offering the first EMI Objective Resilience Short Course at Tongji University.
Stephanie Showalter Otts is the director of the National Sea Grant Law Center and the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Legal Program at the University of Mississippi School of Law. Stephanie received a bachelor’s in history from Penn State University and a joint Juris Doctor/master’s in environmental law from Vermont Law School. She is licensed to practice law in Pennsylvania and Mississippi. As director, Stephanie oversees a variety of legal education, research, and outreach activities, including providing legal research services to Sea Grant constituents on ocean and coastal law issues. Her duties also include the supervision of law student research and writing projects and providing assistance to organizations and governmental agencies with interpretation of statutes, regulations, and case law. Stephanie also teaches a foundational course on ocean and coastal law at the University of Mississippi School of Law. Her research on natural resources, marine, and environmental law issues has been published in a variety of publications. Stephanie has conducted extensive research on marine and freshwater invasive species.
Amanda Drew’s work emergency services began when she was 16 in the volunteer fire service. In 2013 she earned her bachelor’s in science with a major in fire science from Anna Maria College in Paxton, Mass. — introducing her to the emergency management world. In 2016 she earned her master’s in public administration with a concentration in emergency management also from Anna Maria College. Throughout her undergrad and graduate work, she was a call firefighter, a deputy emergency manager for Rutland, Mass.; a campus police dispatcher and later the supervisor at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass. Prior to coming to Ole Mis, she spent about five months in Baton Rouge, La., with the Federal Emergency Management Agency working on a direct housing mission.
Peter W. Pendergrass, MD, MPH, is an associate professor in the department of preventive medicine at the School of Medicine and the School of Population Health at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. He is also the program director for the newly approved preventive medicine residency. He is board certified in public health and general preventive medicine, completing his preventive medicine residency and his master of public health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In addition, Dr. Pendergrass is residency trained in internal medicine and fellowship trained in endocrinology at the University of Oklahoma in Oklahoma City. Dr. Pendergrass graduated from the McGovern School of Medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston.
Anne M. Cafer is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Mississippi. She also serves as coordinator for the Community Based Research Collaborative housed within the UM Center for Population Studies, of which she is an affiliated researcher. She holds a bachelor’s of science in both molecular biology and sociology, a master’s in anthropology and a Ph.D. in rural sociology.